Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (review)

Federico Gamboa published Santa, a tragic novel about a woman seduced by a soldier and trapped in the Porfirian underworld of vice, in 1903. The story achieved widespread success in the theater, and a screen adaptation helped revitalize the Mexican film industry in 1931. Following a remake in 1943, cabaret films depicting the life of prostitution became the foremost genre in Mexican cinema by the end of the decade. The enduring fascination with the figure of Santa, who ultimately dies of venereal disease, reflected a broader concern within Mexican society about the dangers of female deviance. While attributing the problem of prostitution to the decadence of the old regime, revolutionary reformers continually returned to the unsuccessful regulatory methods of Porfirian authorities. Katherine Bliss provides an insightful account of the contradictions that frustrated attempts to revolutionize gender politics in Mexico City.

From the Porfiriato through the Revolution, Mexican criminal law was based on the fundamental double standard that considered sexuality to be normal in males and deviant in females. The onus for preventing disease thus fell on women, and Porfirian health regulations required the registration and inspection of prostitutes. Officials also sought to contain the trade geographically, although without much success, for women apparently advertised and even performed their services in the Zócalo. Already in 1916, revolutionaries called for the abolition of legalized prostitution as a way of redeeming the Mexican people, but Constitutionalist generals had too much interest in the trade, both as patrons and profiteers, to allow genuine reform. President Plutarco Elías Calles initiated an admirable public education campaign, but while ostensibly concerned with the spread of venereal disease, the real target seemed to be the Catholic Church. In any event, by the 1930s, the government had lapsed into a policy of attempting to make prostitution invisible but accessible, particularly to tourists; indeed, cabarets had come to be seen by many as an essential element of a modern metropolis. The abolition of legalized prostitution, when it finally came in 1940, had little real effect, causing readers to wonder just what, beyond the rhetoric, was revolutionary about sexual politics in this period.

In answering that question, contemporary historiography seems to point to changes in popular mentalities, and Bliss is at her best in describing the mobilization of citizens, particularly the women in the sex trade. Thorough archival research, most notably from the Mexico City juvenile court, reveals the ability of women to shape their own lives despite the exploitation of customers, pimps, and the state. They used the legal system and even petitioned the president, demanding the same respect accorded to mothers. Yet unlike labor unions and peasant leagues, prostitutes found it difficult to organize in their own defense, largely because their identity was forged by a common desire to escape la vida.

The meaning of honor is perhaps the most difficult aspect of Mexican prostitution, and indeed, society, to pin down. Bliss is careful to separate the women from their work, and always bears in mind the financial necessity that obliged women to remain in the trade, but as in the case of the fictional Santa, the loss of honor seems invariably to emerge as the reason for becoming a prostitute. Yet the archival evidence seems to call out for a more nuanced analysis of working-class honor, particularly in the context of dancehalls, theaters, and cabarets where señoritas mingled with less respectable women. If the interiors of these establishments remain somewhat obscure, the book provides an excellent overview of the urban geography of vice, although an inexplicably reversed map (p. 68) disoriented the reviewer, who has spent so much time walking those streets.

Historians of criminality have recently made great strides in illuminating the lives of poor, urban dwellers in Mexico. By showing women to be more than...